Comment by lproven
9 days ago
> I never understood the issue with the ribbon UI. Epecially for Office it was great, so much easier to find stuff.
1. I don't need to find stuff.
I knew where stuff is.
2. I read text. I only need menus. I don't need toolbars etc. and so I turn them all off.
I cannot read icons. I have to guess. It's like searching for 3 things I need in an unfamiliar supermarket.
3. Menus are very space efficient.
Ribbons hog precious vertical space. This is doubly disastrous on widescreens.
4. I am a keyboard user.
I use keys to navigate menus. It's much faster than aiming at targets with the mouse and I don't need to look. The navigation keys don't work any more.
Ribbons help those who don't know what they are doing and do not care about speed and efficiency.
They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
> They punish experts who do know, don't search, don't hunt, and customise themselves and their apps for speed and efficient use of time and screen space.
The problem is, most users are utterly braindead, they barely manage to type at speed instead of pecking at single keys. The astonishment I've gotten in some places for literally nothing more than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V is more than enough proof.
That's also IMHO a large portion of why Linux never really took off on desktop. UX/UI people are rare enough to begin with, most of them don't work on FOSS in their free time, and so development is primarily done by nerds for nerds. That's great if you already know something about the application - but usually the learning curve is so steep that most users frustratedly give up. And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
The exception is Blender. They got some serious money IIRC, cleaned up their act, and now there's a headline of some movie or game using Blender every few weeks.
100% true.
The sad thing is that Windows has a great keyboard UI and it's superbly accessible for people with visual and motor disabilities.
Who have reduced earning opportunities because they are disabled, so FOSS should be great for them, but it isn't, because the nerds don't know CUA and don't know the keyboard UI. They spend their time mastering a couple of ancient apps like Vi and Emacs and ignore the fiery furnace of UI R&D that followed for the next 20Y after those early efforts.
Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user with 20 years' practice. It makes Emacs look like a wet paper pad and a burned stick compared to a Moleskine notebook and a top quality fountain pen.
Xfce comes close and implements maybe 75% of the UI but once you are in an app all bets are off.
> Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user
Do you have a reference for this? I've often needed to control Windows using only a keyboard and failed to do so. I'm aware of most shortcuts in this list[1] but these are for a few very specific things. (As an aside, I also remember controlling the mouse with the numpad using the Mouse Keys accessibility setting but this is worse than both keyboard shortcuts and the mouse.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts
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> Learn Windows' keyboard UI and you can drive the whole OS and all its apps with the speed of a genius Vim user with 20 years' practice
I'm sure you can give me some hints, because Microsoft, can't.
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> The sad thing is that Windows has a great keyboard UI
Windows also has a great help system, online. /s
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> And documentation is either not existing, incomplete or horribly outdated, and StackOverflow etc. are even worse.
Or the documentation is very complete, but only useful if you read and comprehend it in its entirety. Open source devs need to understand that not everyone using their software wants to become an expert in it. They just want to get a task done and the software is facilitating completing that task. That is something totally normal and those users should not be thought of as less important than the power users.
> The problem is, most users are utterly braindead
Yeah, that's Microsoft's idea. All user are idiots. That's why they are not able to fix bugs but only change the UI.
Just hide the ribbon.
On a Mac, that's fine. On Windows, it's not, because then I can't control the app any more.
I have been using Word since version 4 on DOS and version 5 on Classic MacOS. On Windows, I used WinWord 1, 2, 6, 95, 97, 2000, XP and 2003... then 4 years later MS ripped out the UI I knew backwards and had known for about 16 years, since 1991, and replaced it with one inferior in every way for me.
I'm not denying it might be better for others but for me it's now a waste of disk space.
The old versions do all I need, so I keep them. For everything except Word, there is LibreOffice.
But LibreOffice Writer has no outline mode, and I am a writer: that is THE killer function of Word for me.
So, Word 97 under WINE on Linux and Word 2003 when I have to use Win10 or -- shudder -- Win11.
And it'll be back in the next update.